Shawn Ryan Show - #87 Michael Shellenberger - The Demise of California | Part 1

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

Michael Shellenberger is an award winning Journalist and best selling Author. He is best known for his book "San Fransicko," a cautionary tale of how progressives ruin cities. Michael and Shawn jump straight into the current state of California and its failed policies. Michael breaks down how legislation intended to decriminalize homelessness and drug abuse actually enabled the problems rather than solving them. Michael also uncovers the double standards and corruption of the California state government during the pandemic. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs - USE CODE "HELIXPARTNER20" https://shopify.com/shawn Michael Shellenberger Links: X - https://twitter.com/shellenberger IG - https://www.instagram.com/shellenberger Substack - Public.Substack.com Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Your business has grown fast, from opening your first location to planning an expansion in no time. And with your business platinum card from American Express, you can access spending power and payment flexibility to fuel your growth. Sarah, the contractor is here with the plans. American Express, don't do business without it. Terms and conditions apply visit mx.ca slash business platinum. So you think you know sports? Points vet is the sportsbook for you. Because we've got the features for true competitors.

Like live same game parlates. Use your sportsmarts to make pics live on the players and teams you're watching. And qualified bets can use our early cashout feature. So you could take your winnings to play live blackjack on the same points bet at. The platform that gives you everything you need. You know what to do. Bet on it. Point Spets Sportsbook and Casino. The state of California has been a very popular discussion amongst Americans for several

years now. There is a mass exodus of people fleeing that state, literally hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people who are considering themselves political refugees are fleeing the state. My next guest actually ran for governor against the famous Gavin Newsome and lost, surprisingly, but we brought him in. We brought him in because we want to dive in to just exactly what the heck is going on in that state and so Ladies and gentlemen if you get anything out of these podcasts, please head over to Apple Podcasts head over to Spotify leave us a review subscribe to the YouTube channel comment give us a like and Ladies and gentlemen without further ado

Please welcome my next guest, Mr. Michael Schellenberger. Michael Schellenberger, welcome to the show. Thanks Mr. Henry Shaw, it's really happy to be here. It's, I've been trying to get a hold of you for a long time and we finally connected over the UFO whistleblower stuff. You used a couple of my things for a piece that you wrote and I want to thank you for doing that. That really helped me out and I'm just happy that you made it to Tennessee and that you're sitting here and we're going to have a great conversation. Well thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate

what you've done for veterans. It's very moving. It's apparent your concern and your passion for that community. And I really appreciate that. Thank you. I've come to see the importance of that community more than ever, including on the UAP stuff since so many people are coming from that community and taking risks to step forward. So yeah, I appreciate you for that. I thank you. So we're here to talk all about California. So we're in Tennessee. There are a ton of Californians moving here. In fact, one of my friends, Rob Lone, just moved here from California.

He's a wealth strategist and his neighborhood that he moved into is 60% California. Wow. And the state, I believe, Tennessee has grown 20% year after year of COVID. And it's you know, it's really, I mean, the growth, I guess a lot of people love the growth, but I think it's kind of destroying the state. It's just Tennessee is a beautiful state and it's turning into concrete. It's creating a lot of issues where people can't afford to live here anymore, especially the ones that were born and raised here. And so anyways, with Epi and said, I would love to unpack what is going on in California, all in one segment. I've

never heard it all just condensed into one segment and figure out why there are just droves of people leaving. And hopefully we can get to some, how do we fix this stuff? That sounds great. So, just quick intro on you, former public relations professional topics of politics, environment, climate change, nuclear power, founder of the Breakthrough Institute

and Environmental Research Center, Time Magazine Award for Hero of the Environment in 2008, author of Apocalypse Never in San Francisco, San Francisco. Green Book Award winner in 2008, you unpacked the Twitter files with Elon Musk. Your political affiliation was Democrat previous to 2022 and you switched to independent in 2022. You're based out of Berkeley, California. Am I missing anything? A little bit, but in the ran for governor. Yeah. You ran for governor, which is actually why I originally wanted to speak with you. And you ran against Gavin Newsome, and I'd love to to talk about how that was to. In fact, maybe we could start right there.

Why did you, why did you, is that the first time you've ever ran in politics? I ran in 2018 and the candidacy didn't go anywhere, but Governor always felt like a job I should have. This sounds crazy, but I remember thinking about for the first time I was like, I could do that job and I think I have a vision for the state. I love California. I mean, I moved to California right after college in 1993. And I'm just really passionate about it. I love the people.

I love the geography. For me, it's sort of the best of America. It's also the worst of America. For me, it's sort of the best of America. It's also the worst of America. It's a state that, you know, when you get there and people will ask about you, it's not like, you know, trying to always put you on some status hierarchy. You know, if it's not easy to go on the East Coast, people will say, where'd you go to school?

And that's their way of figuring out if you're important or not. California people have always been more interested in like, who are you, man? You know, like, what do you do? It's not like, oh, it's not like the big ol' basket. You know, there's a sense of, you know, do your own thing, man.

You know, it's the home of the human potential movement of what used to be called sort of peak psychology, positive psychology. What are you doing to make the most of your life? Your life is limited. You know, what are you gonna do to really seize the best of yourself to realize the best of yourself? That was the California I was drawn to.

I was definitely on the radical left as a young man. I spent a much of time traveling around the world, working with radical movements, and have started to see some of the dark side of that in California. And in particular, the way it shows up most dramatically is what we call homelessness. Folks on the streets, you know, I have three friends from high school growing up that became homeless addicts, you know, two or dead.

My aunt. Sorry to hear that. Yeah. My aunt had schizophrenia, so mental illness is something that I was familiar with. I understood I understood addiction and when you talk to people on the street, it's obviously not just because they couldn't make the rent. These are folks suffering overwomingly from untreated mental illness and or addiction. And to just see the devastation, you know, we had a woman Sean,

they had mental, serious mental illness, maybe he gets a fran here. Her legs, she was on the streets. Her legs were rotting. You know, they're both. They took her off the street. They amputated the bottom parts of her legs. And then can you guess what they did after that?

Put her back on the street. Put her back on the street. That's not civilized behavior. You know, I would travel around the world, I've looked at how other countries deal with, you know, what we call homeless, this addiction and illness. And everybody does the same thing, which is that you get medical care for people that need it. And when people are so out of their brains that they, that they say, oh, no, I'm fine my legs rotting on the street or being assaulted on the streets, overdosing and dying on the streets.

Civilized people say that's not okay, you're not well. Part of your illness is that you think you're okay, you're obviously not. And we get them care and you get them rehabilitation for drugs, psychiatric care, if you're mentally ill. We don't do that. And I wanted to understand why that was. That's why I wrote San Francisco. I couldn't understand. We say we're so compassionate.

We think we're more compassionate than other people in other states. But this is cruelty. You know, you know, we, one time I, we came, I was, an early morning, a dawn cleanup with a cleanup crew in San Francisco to clean up after the open air drug scenes and the partying and all the stuff that goes on at night. And the morning we discovered there was three men lying in the street. They had created police barricades around themselves. They had, you know, feces, needles, old food, clothing all around them.

They were lying on the heat fence. And the outreach worker I was with said, come on, you guys got to get up. Let's go. You got to get up. And one of the men said, I can't because my back is broken. I mean, he's a broken back in these line in the middle of the street, someone from the city drove by and they said, what's going on? We said, this gentleman has a broken back. And they're like, oh, we'll do something. Well, one week later, he was still there in the street. I mean, if you, like, if I wouldn't, if I was listening to somebody describing what I'm

describing, I wouldn't believe it, you know, or you shouldn't believe it. But now people know, I needed to document all of it. We've now shot a lot of videos showing this, but it's absolutely horrific. And I just couldn't figure out what was going on. Like why were we not providing people with the care they need? You have footage of all this? We have a lot of video footage.

You know, when the book came out, I was criticized. The New York Times, of course, they didn't like my book. And they claimed I had not interviewed any homeless people, which was hilarious. Are you serious? They resorted to lies about the book. And so I couldn't figure out, I didn't want to have an argument about how many who I interviewed. So I just said, look, I'm just going to go and just go back to the streets, interview people on video, and interview a lot of people. A lot of the videos went viral. You know, I had, you know, people were very honest.

I mean, they actually, and a lot of people are lonely on the street and they wanna share their stories. But I started interviewing people and they were coming to me telling, these people living on the streets because of their addiction and they were telling me they were like, the situation is out of control. Somebody needs to do something.

They said people, they pay you to be homeless in San Francisco. And that's something I documented already. They give cash $600, $600, $150 a month in cash to people if they're homeless, including if they're coming from out of state, and then they can usually get a couple hundred bucks in food stamps that they then trade, you know, some discount on the dollar in Chinatown and they can maintain their drug habit. There's actually not as much pain handling anymore because it's so easy to get cashed by your drugs. 20 to 40 bucks a day and you can usually get enough meth and fentanyl to smoke all day.

So yeah, I mean, this has all been well documented. It sparked a huge backlash. Some of the, I work with mothers who have kids on the street that they want to see the police arrest and require to get rehab because they're so trapped in their addiction, like the, or their mental illness, like the woman with the legs or the guy with the broken back. They're trapped by their own psychiatric disorders, which we understand very well.

We've been staying in addiction for over 150 years. We know that people in addiction, they require an intervention, treatment, and then recovery, which is a lifelong process. This is not a rocket science. This is not super complicated. We know how to deal with these problems. And so the question for me was, why don't we, like, why is it that we're not doing the prop,

why are we not willing to intervene and take care of the folks who obviously need it? So is that why you decided to run for governor? Was kind of a humanitarian role to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, to, I, you know, after I finished writing the book in early 2021, a number of the mothers who are trying to get their kids off the streets, I worked with them to create a movement called California Peace Coalition. You know, peace in the streets comes from peace in the body and the mind. And then some of the mothers started something called mothers against drug addictions and

deaths. And then some of the mothers started something called mothers against drug addictions and deaths, a beautiful group of people, very brave. These are mothers who are suffering every day, worrying about their kids dying on the streets. They can't get their kids off the street because the laws are against them. They said, they asked me at an event in San Francisco, would you consider running?

And I had thought that there would be somebody else, like a professional politician who was gonna do it, but nobody wanted to step forward. So I was happy to do it. It was a position, like I said, I was always like, I think I know how to do that job. And we didn't make it past the primary, unfortunately, but I think we elevated the issue a bit.

The governor's starting to do some stuff, but basically the situation is as bad as it's always been if not worse. Man, it seems to be getting worse. I mean, there's a long list of things that I want to talk to you about that are going on in California, but just, I believe it's this year,

already 343,000 people have already left the state. How many people do you have a gauge on how many people have been leaving year after year? And when did this start? I don't have the exact numbers on me, but the population has declined. We actually lost a congressional seat because our population declined and other states grew faster. This is a huge change. I mean, California was, you know,

it's still at 39 million. It's just hovering at 39 million. Everybody thought we were going to 50 million. You know, even just 10, 20 years ago, there was a lot of optimism. I mean, California was, was the state of optimism. I mean, it was sort of the most American, the American states.

It was the frontier. And it's just so, it's just gotten so bad. I mean, we spend, you know, you know, a lot of us spend 10% of our income on state taxes, on top of the federal taxes. And I'm happy to pay my taxes if it's going to helping people, but it's actually enabling addiction in this kind of victimhood ideology, this idea that if you're suffering from addiction or if you're a racial minority or if you have a disability or mental illness, that you're a victim. This is the message. And you will always be a victim. And for victims, only things should be given and nothing required. Well, that's a disaster for people that need to recover from their addiction.

They need to be told that they have the potential to be heroes. That everybody faces adversity. Yes, we should help each other. Yes, we should provide people with the rehab they need. But ultimately, it depends on people to make that choice and be able to lift themselves out of it. I wanna tell you about this business venture I've been on for about the past seven, eight months, and it's finally come to fruition.

I've been hell-bent on finding the cleanest functional mushroom supplement on the planet, and that all kind of stemmed from the psychedelic treatment I did. Came out of it got a ton of benefits, haven't had a drop of alcohol in almost two years. I'm more in the moment with my family. And that led me down researching the benefits of just everyday functional mushrooms. And I started taking some supplements,

I found some coffee replacements, I even wrapped a brand and you know it got to the point where I just wanted the finest ingredients available no matter where they come from. And it got to this point where I was just going to start my own brand. And so we started going to trade shows and looking for the finest ingredients. And in doing that I ran into this guy, maybe you've heard of him, his name's Laird Hamilton, and his wife Gabby Reese. And they have an entire line of supplements with all the finest ingredients. And we got to talk and it turns out They have the perfect functional mushroom supplement It's actually called performance mushrooms and this has everything. It's USDA organic. It's got chaga Cordriceps lion's mane Miyataki. This stuff is amazing for

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Let's get back to the show. Why do you think that, why do you think homelessness is so, why do you think that's why do you think homelessness is so, why do you think that's such a problem in California? I mean, it's a problem throughout the entire US, but it seems, I mean, I haven't been to California in quite some time. I, in 2001, I was there for the military,

going through buds, and then I hadn't gone back until last year. And I flew in, I kind of mentioned, you know, did a psychedelic experience in Mexico and flew into San Diego, but seeing how much homelessness is just right outside of downtown, I couldn't, I've never seen anything like that. And I've been to some poor parts of the world.

I mean, I've been to Yemen, you know, Yemen is this poorest country in the Middle East, up in the Afghanistan. I mean, I've never seen tents anywhere, just lined up of what appeared to me to be just people doing drugs and their tents and and I mean how many what percentage of the state is homeless? It's a great question. It's around a hundred thousand. A hundred thousand homeless.

Yes, around a hundred thousand and and it's not a consequence of poverty. It's a consequence of addiction, and untreated mental illness to some extent. But the basic picture is you get addicted to hard drugs, stop working, you overstay, you're welcome with friends and family, you lie, steal and cheat, the family's then confronted with,

what do I do? Do I continue to enable the addiction? Or do I evict them? They have you evict them and then they go live on the streets. These are open air drug scene that's the right word for it. Helmless encampment is a euphemism. You know these are very very sick people. I mean your you methamphetamine even methamphetamine I mean metham's worse than speed is worsephetamine, I mean, meth is worse than speed, is worse than cocaine. The fentanyl is worse than heroin, but worse than alcohol.

And then they're combining them. And they're very cheap, they're synthetic, they're made in labs. They're very addictive. Fentanyl is a wonderful thing if you're gonna have back surgery or if you're gonna give birth to a child and you need that immediate relief, short term relief,

but boy, for addicts, it's absolutely the worst. And so you get a lot of death, a lot of overdose. It's fundamentally a mis-medical mistreatment that leaves people on the streets. It's not fundamentally, I mean, we need more housing. You know, the rents are definitely too high, but it's not like people can't afford the rent and they go live on the street.

It's they get addicted and their lives fall apart and then they go on the street. When did you see this really start to take off? I first visited California when I was 15, so that must have been 1986 around there. And we saw, I mean, the ill people on the streets, you know, the first wave of homelessness in the 80s was a combination of releasing people out of mental hospitals

without proper care in the community, combined with the crack epidemic. And it was all usually crack and alcohol the combination of those two drugs. And that was the first homeless epidemic. And I would see people on the streets and say, well, it's just going, my parents were psychologists, so they were able to explain.

These are folks with mental illness. And then you'd, you know, the question would be, like, why are they all on the streets? Why are they not getting care in hospitals or in group homes was the idea? But we didn't have the laws in place to require people to stay in their homes and so they would go out onto the streets.

And this, California is a more extreme version of other parts of the country. And I should say, it's not the only thing going on. I mean, the more temperate weather means you can sleep outdoors all year round. So in Boston and New York and colder places will come inside. But we don't see this in places like Florida or warmer states. And so it's not, it can't just be the weather. Some of it is the, I mentioned the Big Lebowski, the Big Lebowski culture.

You know, it's kind of take it easy, man. You might remember, you know, it's like, hey, you like to drink white russians and rosé, they like to smoke math and fentanyl. It's a kind of relativism. I mean, some of the, it's, it's, if I love about California, take into an extreme, you know, it's a, it's a very libertarian culture, like you should do your own thing. Like it's, but when that leads to addiction for entry mental illness, then you sort of get these really destructive and self-destructive behaviors right there in your backyard.

But I think the most important thing, the thing that's really driving it in terms of what the politicians think and the activist nonprofit groups and the people providing the services is victimhood ideology. And victimhood ideology is this idea that you can divide the whole world into victims and oppressors.

But if you're a victim, you're always a victim. Nothing you can really do about it. All you can do is kind of humiliate. You can get a little bit of help, but you can't become a hero. I talk about the process of recovery for recovering addicts or alcoholics or the typical recovery. It's a heroic process because you are suffering, you are in a bad way and you overcome it. Not by yourself, you have a sponsor, you go to AA or 12 separate, whatever you go through rehab. But ultimately, the idea is everybody

has the potential to become free and to become in control of their lives. And this is a very empowering, it was a very liberal idea, in, is recently as the 1960s, with the human potential movement. It was the best of the, of the liberal, positive psychology movement. It's 12-staff, it's human potential.

That's been taken over by a much more radical, positive psychology movement, it's 12-step, it's human potential. That's been taken over by a much more radical, very radical left wing, very extreme, and very, think of a misery with Kathy Bates in it. That kind of energy of a kind of, I wanna care for you in that really creepy, dark way where I wanna care for you so much I'm going to hurt you. So it's almost monk housing syndrome by proxy, you know, which is when parents will poison their children, so that they can take care of them. I'm not saying that this is quite what it is. The best way I could say it is sort of pathological altruism. might start from coming from a good place. I want to help other people,

but it becomes pathological because you're not, if you really want to help someone, then you need to help them to become independent and free. If you're just trying to keep them dependent on you by enabling their addiction, rather than helping them to get into recovery, then you're maintaining their victimhood status. And that is basically the underlying problem

behind the homelessness problem in California. Do you think that there is, I mean, it sounds like you get rewarded for being an addict in California. 100% I mean, we talked about the allowances. Yes. And I mean, freehouse, I'll give you a sense of it.

In Birmingham, Alabama, they did these experiments in the 1980s. All homeless addicts, mostly crack addicts, would get a stay in shelter at night in a called congregate shelter. They'd all be in the same area. And once you're there, everybody wants their own room. That's the one the first things people want. They want some privacy, understandably. They made it if you pass a drug test, then you can have your own room.

You go up to your own room and you like it. You're better. You have a reward for good behavior. What happens if you fail your drug test? Because people relapse. It happens. It's often part of a recovery. You don't go back on the street, but you do go back to the concrete shelter.

This is called contingency management, so that your rewards are contingent. So it's carrots and sticks. You know, I'm a big admirer of how they handle this in Amsterdam. Amsterdam had, Amsterdam is this incredibly liberal city, right, prostitution is legal. Marijuana, you can buy it at the coffee shop.

But they had these big open drug scene of heroin addicts. And it was this typical thing, the very liberal, supposedly more caring people wanted to just enable and help, and they didn't want to require anybody to clean up their act. Finally, they said, it's got to be carrots and sticks. You got to have rewards for doing the right thing and consequences for doing the wrong thing because if you don't have consequences for bad behavior, then you're going to do more bad behavior. So it's, I mean, you're a dad and I'm a dad. And anybody that has kids know that if you don't have any consequences for bad behaviors, you don't have to spank your kids. You don't have to, you know, it doesn't have to be always super harsh, but there has to

be some consequence for engaging in self-destructive or destructive actions. And then some reward when you're doing things on your path to recovery. And that's how you sort of get people up towards recovery. And it made you have some one step forward, one step back and two steps forward, but it's pretty simple, but we just took away all the sticks in California. It's all just carrots. And if it's just carrots, then they're actually not carrots. People start to feel entitled, I'm an addict,

I'm on the street, I'm homeless, give me an apartment. Well, no, you should have to earn your apartment. If you're an apartment. Do you think that there is some type of an in agenda behind the behind and I mean they're incentivizing people to to use? Yes. Is there an agenda behind that or is this like a no serious agenda? Yeah. Is there is it does it go deeper than that? I mean it because because to me that's common sense. Yeah.

That is common sense. If there are no, and we're seeing this in multiple aspects of California where there's no consequences and how things are spinning out of control, at some point, I mean, it doesn't take a genius to figure out hey, why is this happening? Well, there's no consequences. So, no, I mean, I understand what you're asking

because it seems so stupid, really, to have no consequences on behaviors. But, you know, after looking at it for several years, you get to the bottom of it, and you're like, it's just as dumb as it seems. People are just very dogmatic about it. It's almost like a black and white kind of thinking, you know. That person is a victim.

How dare you suggest that we require that they sleep indoors at night or don't use drugs publicly or take their meds if they're sick or obey the law. So it's a very radical and there's a sort of competition on the left in California. So there's a sort of, oh, I'm more compassionate because I'm letting the so-called victims do even more crazy things than you want to do. So it's really that dumb. I don't think there's anybody that wants to see these things happen. It's just a, you know, I mean, California became, there used to be a balance between Republicans and Democrats, and now, when it's all Democrats,

it's just a competition over who's gonna be the most compassionate, and that ends up creating this cruelty. I mean, I just, I do not, I don't understand it. I don't, I mean, I have friends who have businesses there in very prominent locations in California, LA, Malibu, San Francisco. I mean, the real estate, there's some of the most expensive real estate in the world. And some of these guys have businesses in these locations on in well to do areas of the and you get people defecating right in front of their business.

You know, it peon, poop in in the street, camping out, right? I mean, how, what are the people of Cal? What is the majority of the people in California think about the situation? Oh, we're I mean, we're fed up. I mean, people are leaving. You know, I mean, it's also important to remember that the there's a lot of us that live, there's a lot of it's very hilly and like hills in in San Francisco, Bay Area, and also in LA. So you can get away from it. You know, you own a home up in the hills and it's very beautiful. Like I own a home in the Berkeley Hills and I can see the Golden Gate Bridge

and there's not people outside my home doing that. So we can get away from it. And when you talk to people and I'll be like, you know, it's friends, they ask, what are you working on? I tell them about this and they go, oh yeah, that's why I don't go downtown. So there's a people downtown that are affected by it.

You know, everyone's got a Black Lives Matter sign in front of their yard up in the Berkeley Hills. You know, they think they're being compassionate by defunding the police, you know, or by removing criminal prosecution for theft under a thousand dollars, under $950. They think they are, but in fact, they're defunding the police in neighborhoods that are high crime

and that need more police. You know, I discovered in the research, you know, liberals love to look up to Europe as a model of progressivism. Well, they have 20 to 30% more police officers per capita than we have in the United States. They really, they believe in to 30% more police officers per capita than we have in the United States. They were really.

They were even the police in Europe. And they don't allow people to use heroin or smoke fennel or defecate in public in Amsterdam. You don't see that? I mean, it's so bad there. I mean, I just read, I think it was a couple of weeks ago, maybe a month ago. I just, a little kid, I mean, just playing on the playground, slides down the slide, hits a fentanyl needle, dead, done. You know, and, and,

I mean, it's just, how can you, when you hear stories like that, that can't be the only time that's happened. Oh, there's a baby that, that OD'd on fentanyl, who's revived, in one of the richest neighborhoods in San Francisco, the journalism

is so awful that nobody figured out what was going on. I went there and I discovered that there was an open drug scene in the ballpark in the baseball diamonds. So it's everywhere. The drugs are everywhere. The fentanyl is super potent in toxin. People are trapped by their mentality, by their ideology. They are so sure that they're the caring and compassionate ones that they will not listen to a different point of view.

Even though when you ask people, the majority of people, 75% of the voters say when you ask people, the majority of people, 75% of the voters say when you ask them, should, if you're defecate, use drugs or camp illegally or publicly, should you be arrested and mandated drug rehab as an alternative to jail? 75% of Californians say yes. The disconnect is in the politics. There's interest groups that are making money, that have a ideology

that are very radical, and they end up controlling the politicians like Governor Gavin Newsom, you know, who can't or doesn't care about doing anything to address the problem because he's too scared of staying up to these radical left-wing interest groups. Look, okay. So, who are the radical interest groups groups and how do you make money off homelessness? Well, I should say they definitely make money off homelessness. There is a homeless industrial complex, but I should also say that in Netherlands, somebody gets paid to take care of addicts too. So it's not like we shouldn't be against, you know, having spending the money

you need to get people to care they need. I mean, if you're more schizophrenia is something that you, you know, it's probably some combination of genetics and the environment shows up around when people go to college. Obviously, people with schizophrenia are going to have a really tough time and they're going to need some help. But that's not the point. The point is that we're spending all this money to make the problem worse. Yeah, I mean, $17.5 billion in the last four years on the homelessness crisis in California. California has 30% of the nation's total homeless population.

I mean, but how are they making, how is the homeless industrial complex? I mean, how do they make money off of homelessness? I mean, the biggest source of money is providing housing. And the problem with it is, I mentioned before that, studying Birmingham in the 80s. That's all we,

that's the best we can do is that you should have to require people to sleep inside. It's not safe to sleep have to require people to sleep inside. It's not safe to sleep outside. You have to come inside. You have to enforce the anti-camping laws. Come inside because we can only, you can only be protected inside, you know, like 100% of the women that we interview on the streets have been raped. I mean, it's, it's all of them. It's horrible.

It's absolutely horrible. And they're so out of their minds with addiction, desperate, turning tricks for $20, $40, and then being raped frequently, they have to come inside. It's not to say that nothing bad ever happens in the shelters. You gotta run the shelters right.

They gotta be safe and clean and basic. But you're a lot less likely to be murdered or assaulted in a shelter or hit by a car, run over by cars. That happens to people. If you're in a shelter, then you're in the shelter and then you should have a case worker that comes up to you and says, we're going to create a plan for you to get back on track. We get your psych evaluation, group therapy, get some future for yourself, get a vision of yourself in recovery, and you get a personal plan.

Not everybody's gonna make it. It's gonna be hard to recover from methamphetamine and fentanyl use as you've been doing these a couple of long time, but some people can, you will. This is what they've done in every civilized country in the world. It's basically, there's cultural variations between Portugal and the Netherlands and Japan and Korea, but those are right in a wrong way to deal with addiction and mental illness.

And we're doing it the absolute wrong way. We're enabling addiction and self-destructive behaviors rather than supporting, you know, pro-social, pro-human methods of recovery. What would you, if you had won the regabiner race, what would have been the first thing you would have done to combat the homelessness issue? I would use the executive powers that the governor of California has, which are very significant powers. The governor is a very powerful person in California.

There are certain things you obviously want to try to get the legislature on board and align and do them all, but I believe that, had I been elected, I would have had the mandate of the people to take immediate action to save lives. So, I mean, we're, you know, we're, you know, somewhere around 30 to 60 drug overdose deaths a month in San Francisco alone. Every single one of those deaths is preventable. There's no reason anybody should be dying of drug overdoses on the streets. So the first thing is you make everybody come inside. So you would, you would take the time you need to create shelters, basic, clean, congregate shelters, safe shelters. People have to come inside, you can't sleep outside,

it's not safe outside. Maybe you give people a warning for a night or two, but then they got to come inside. Once they're inside, then you can offer them treatment. We know how to detox people off of these very hard drugs, at least with fentanyl. We have a good substitute in the form of suboxone and sublicate as a 30-day version of that. Meth is harder, but we can use contingency management to provide people with rewards.

You get your own room. You get people off the street that way, the other way is that we enforce law, we started enforcing the law. So we all believe in personal liberty. So I personally don't think that just because you're an addict, means you should be arrested, not if you're not breaking into the laws. But if you are breaking the law, sleeping outside illegally, defecating illegally, using drugs or dealing drugs publicly, you should be arrested.

And given the choice, we need a new agency, I'm calling it Cal Psych. It says, John, you've overdosed for the 12th time on the streets. You're camping here illegally, you've got drugs and clearly stolen bicycles usually. I'm either going to arrest, officer Garcia here is going to arrest you and you can kick in jail and it'll be horrible. You're welcome to do that because we have the ability to arrest you for the crimes that were suspected of committed. Or we can get you in rehab, and get you on a suboxone taper,

starting right now, and you will transition off of the fentanyl, and we'll get you in a rehab clinic, you can go right now, all the way to the clinic, and it'll be at 90 days, but it'll extend to six months or a year. If that's what you need, you know,

you'll be in a rehab facility. You'll meet with psychology, psychology professional, you'll be in group therapy and we're gonna get your life back on track. We're gonna get you to family and friends. Get your life back on track. Those are your choices,

but it's not a choice to remain on the street anymore. We've revived you 12 times from your overdoses. Taxpayers don't want to do that anymore. Taxpayers want to save your life, but we've been saved, we've saved your life 12 times. It's time to go in. And the neighbors here don't want you to sleep in in front of their house and screaming and defecating and using drugs in front of their apartment anymore. And these are powers that I believe the governor currently has.

There's some laws that are gonna have to be changed. You know, let the members of the legislature that wanna defend chaos and violence and destruction let them defend it as governor, I'm gonna put it to the people and say, what do you, this is, let's handle this in the same humane way that the Netherlands and Portugal and Japan and every other civilized country in the world has it.

And let's stop being idiots and cruel in our supposed compassion. That seems like a great start. Let's move into some of the stuff that happened after COVID in California. So, you know, it was the strictest, how do I say this, the strictest response that I've heard about throughout the country. And I mean, in we saw a lot of hypocrisy from the politicians over there. I remember, you know, there was a big story about a woman whose hair is

salon got shut down. And because she wasn't going to comply with the mask mandate or the vaccine mandate, or I can't remember exactly what it was. And then what it was the same week, Nancy Pelosi is out. Who's mandating all of this, is out getting her hair done with no mask on. We got Gavin Newsom, who's pushing this stuff throughout the entire state, locking,

just shutting all the businesses down, except from what I understand, his own wineries, or his own wineries in the Napa area. But shut all his competitors down. I mean, how, how is it? Do Californians not know this? How did he get reelected? I mean, he got recalled. And what, what's the mentality to our people uninformed or that they just not care? Well, they, I think we, we all, we all care about it. The politicians know that there's no

we're quite like California. And those of us that have stuck around in California, it's because we're like in a bad relationship. We know it's not good for us, but we're so in love with the state. And we don't want to move. We might have golden handcuffs because where else can we get a house like our house in California?

We get mistreated. We get overtaxed. Our tax money is corrupt. There's no word for it. It's wasted. It's making the problem worse. I mean, I actually have a moral, I have a moral dilemma about this. I know that our taxes are paying to enable addiction and death on the streets. I don't want my, I mean, I feel guilty about it. But then it's, then what do I do? I just leave the state. I don't know if that helps things either.

I want to, I want to save the state. So yeah, I think it's a mix that, you know, people, there's a lot, there's some percentage of people, the hardcore left, you know, maybe 20 to 30% of the voters who are just really dogmatic and they don't want to hear a different point of you. I think there's, you know, 30 to 40% that really want change and vote for change every time. And then the rest are up for grabs. And they, you know, I think people will put their property values first, sadly, over what kind of happens downtown. You know, the schools are awful.

I mean, we kept the schools closed during COVID. And the consequences were catastrophic for young people. I mean, we're now very behind continuing chronic absences. It was an abuse of power during COVID. It was, it wasn't in the interest of the kids. It was an abuse of power by the teachers unions to keep the schools closed. And the teachers unions are such heavy campaign contributors to Governor Gavin Newsom.

They just wanted to stay home. I mean, it's pretty cynical actually. They needed to get back into the classroom. The kids need that social life. The risks to the kids, the risks to the most teachers was very low. Whereas those kids weren't learning on the to most teachers was very low. Whereas this kids weren't learning on Zoom. My daughter was at home, you know, they're not,

they can't learn on Zoom. You gotta be in the classroom. Plus so much of school is learning how to be social. It's learning how to get around and to interact with people. And you need to see people's faces. You need this. There's no substitute for this. So it was a, you know, it a pretty selfish people to be perfectly honest,

putting themselves ahead of vulnerable people. And so people should be suspicious. When you hear the politicians talking about how much they care about the vulnerable, they're protecting the vulnerable. Is that really what's going on? Or are they taking advantage of the vulnerable? I see the border crisis. When I see the border crisis,

I see a very similar dynamic as we see with the homeless situation, where it's really desperate vulnerable people who have been put in, been allowed to be in that situation because of supposedly compassionate politics, compassionate policies that underneath them have a real selfishness. There's a political agenda behind the open borders. There's a political agenda behind the open air drug scenes and the chaos on the streets. There's money involved. There's power involved. And all of the language is used to justify what I think is at bottom a kind of cruelty. is used to justify what I think is at bottom a kind of cruelty. When I first started this whole podcasting thing, an online store was about as far from

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even the democratic side is starting to divide. I have a perfect example of it. Last year, you're a Democrat this year, you're an independent. When I'm asking, is there not a better option than Gavin Newsom? What do people say when they're like, I mean, you cannot be more apparent. You know, all these other wineries are shut down except the governors. This is not shut down.

How, I mean, is he answered that at all? Is anybody questioned him on that? Is, no, I mean, people can people who kind of throw out their hands. You know, they don't feel very, I mean, covering is so big. It's, it's, the governor is very far away from the people. You know, he's not a man of the people. I don't think he cares very deeply about ordinary folks.

He does a lot of photo ops. Like one point, you know, when it was getting really, the chaos in San Francisco, you know, he showed up with a broom. I'm pushing a broom in San Francisco. Like, are we supposed to believe that the governor pushing a broom is what the state needs? Nobody thinks that.

You know, he recently flew to Israel after the Hamas attacks and got he flew to Israel. Why why? Mm-hmm. I mean, that's just narcissism. It's just it's just a I mean You know we got people dying on the street and he has the power to get people inside and get them the medical care They need and said he just kind of foam prances around you know like a Enjuting himself in places where he's completely irrelevant. It's inappropriate. It's, you know, like in psychology,

we talk about having appropriate boundaries. And California is just a place that's been transgressing boundaries. It's not appropriate to sleep on the sidewalk. It should never be allowed. It's not appropriate to sleep on the sidewalk. It should never be allowed. It's not appropriate to sleep in the park. It should never be allowed. It's not appropriate to steal $950 worth of items

from the drug store, from Walmart, or from Walgreens. You know, we're losing all of our flagship department stores in San Francisco. Nordstroms moved out, or Navy movedilvy moved out, Gap moved out. San Francisco is like a rich city. This is a world famous. People come from around the world. They come to San Francisco. They want to go shopping. You can't do that. There's just addicts everywhere, mentally ill people everywhere, and can't. It, everywhere, it's a transgression of normal boundaries. And similarly, you have these guys that come in as governor. It was both him and this predecessor. They come in as governor. And the first thing they want to do is be

president. They haven't done anything to help the state. And then you get the governor, and the thing he wants to go to Israel, they want to go to China. I think he's involved in foreign policy. That's not the role of the governor. Well, the governor is to be governor of the state. I mean, it's one of the, it's, I mean, for me, it would be the greatest job in the world to be governor of California. I mean, it's a huge responsibility. It's a huge honor.

You're entrusted with this incredible responsibility. It's the fourth largest economy in the world now, surpassed Germany. Here you have this incredible honor, and you, it's not good enough for Gavin Newsome. He's got to go and pretend like he's president of the United States, even though he hasn't, he's done nothing for the States, made it much worse.

So it is a kind of, I think a lot of the psychopathologies that we see in the society at large that have been increasing anti-social personality disorder, which we used to call psychopathy and narcissism and historic behaviors, historical behaviors. We start to see them very prevalent in the society, in climate activists, and we're seeing the politicians, you know, and so it's, yeah, there's a kind of a sickness.

I mean, people, as you might imagine, you call your book San Francisco and some people get their backs up. But I think that the title is accurate. I think it's not evil exactly. I think there's evil consequences. But it's really just a kind of pathology. It's a sickness that results from people who have very privileged lives. A lot of these are the behaviors that you would see among the kids of rich people, the coddled, spoiled behaviors. The governor's behaviors are the behaviors of sort of a spoiled child of someone who

had no consequences for their behaviors. We started to see that. I've been writing about it because I work on climate change a lot. You see climate actors doing things like throwing tomato soup at a vanco painting. What are you doing? You know, your behavior, these are temper tantrums. So I, for me, I think what you need, and it's for California, I think it's for Americans,

to back to basics, you know, raise your kids right, obey the law, work hard, do your work, control over your life, control the things you can control, and don't worry about the things you can't control. Gavin Newsom can't control Hamas. Yeah. Apparently not even the Prime Minister of Israel can control Hamas. He thought he could. But the governor of California can actually help the cities to enforce the laws and get people to care they need. That is something that's in his responsibilities. But he's not using

his responsibilities. Instead, he's trying to do things that are not his responsibilities. And so he's trying to do things that are not as responsibility. So that's since there's a disordered, it's I think that's the right, we say psychiatric disorders. That's, I think that describes the sickness of California into some extent of the United States as a whole. Let's talk about some of the crime stuff that's been going on in California. The crime creates have increased 6% since 2021 progressive district attorney in San Francisco and Los Angeles face recalls after spikes in violent crimes. Major retailers are leaving San Francisco and Los

Angeles and amidst rampant store thefts and under proposition 47 thefts under $950 will not be prosecuted. There will be considered a misdemeanor and theft has become the de facto and it seems like pretty much all of California. Did this start with the defund the police movement? It goes way back, it goes earlier.

Really to the 1990s, I actually worked on these issues when I was on the left in the 90s. We thought it was sort of cruel. It sort of seems cruel to be sending people to jail or prison for petty crimes. Stealing $100 or a couple of hundred bucks of stuff out of the drugstore. There's all this stuff around, certainly the concerns around race and racism, which are very real concerns in the past. But then you get this overreaction. And so we decriminalized that under nine or something.

I can have that up for a minute. Yeah. I just want to ask you, what do you think inappropriate, what would in your mind, what would inappropriate consequence be for somebody who walks into my business and steals $200 worth of my stuff. Well, I mean, some extent, it depends on what that person, what's going on with that person. I mean, it's why we have laws and then you have judges that can give out different sentences. Is that the first crime for that person? Is that person mentally ill? Is that person an addict? Is that person just a thug? You know, I tell a story, I have two characters in my book, Real Life

Characters, one white, one black. The black character, Jabari, had a whole life of crime, stealing things, you know, walking out of stores, stealing cars, had an addiction. And because he was black and we're so liberal, like every time he would get arrested and there'd be some consequences, the serious penalties would be waived. So he was sort of treated more leniently. The white character was a family guy

who got addicted to opioids, addicted to heroin, then it was on the streets, homeless smoking fanatel. He gets arrested, basically for holding the drugs for dealers, and he had much more severe consequences. Well, turned out, the better to have the severe consequences because then he had the choice between prison and rehab and he chose rehab. My black character, because they were treating him better to have the severe consequences because then he had the choice between prison and rehab

and he chose rehab. My black character, because they were treating him like a victim because of his race, actually got worse off because he never had any consequences and he serious consequences for his behavior. I love the story because it actually, you contrast this thing of, you think you're helping somebody

because you're pitying them and you're feeling sorry for You think you're helping somebody because you're pitying them and you're feeling sorry for them and you're making them worse off because you're never forcing them to deal with the addiction. Jabari was never forced to deal with the addiction. What finally did, he actually, then, he was so sick with addiction. He actually ended up breaking a law on a way

where kind of unconsciously, he was looking for consequences and that was how he eventually got the rehab that he needed. So I think that the specifics of any single person don't matter so much, but this attitude that people are committing crimes because they're victims, it's the wrong attitude. You got to have proper consequences for behavior. Now, if there's addiction and mental illness, then we should try to treat those things too. But even in those cases, many, many addicts, as you know, aren't going to deal with their addiction unless they know that the alternative

is going to prison. If the choice is going into rehab or staying on the street and smoking math and fentanyl, almost all of them are going to stay on the street smoking math and fentanyl. That's why I really like nobody gets into rehab in San Francisco. It's like, I mean, they offer it, but there's no intervention that would require people to go. So just some extent, this intervention, that's what happens when you arrest somebody

for breaking the law. Every time you break the law, there should be some intervention because something obviously went wrong for you to break the law. What about the distribution for the shop shop owner or the business owner or the or the I mean from what I understand You can't even call the police now if you've been robbed and you weren't home. Well, why bother? Well, I mean

Oakland so they did recall the DA in San Francisco Thank God and we have a different district attorney There's now an effort to recall the district from Oakland because she is so radical. I mean, there is a case of a young gang banger shot another gang banger in the face, point blank, killed him. He was out of jail within a year.

They just didn't file the charges to prosecute them. They've lost all of the experienced district attorneys in Oakland, so they cannot properly try a murder case in Oakland. Are these all Soros-funded attorneys? Yes. The district attorney of Oakland is an idiot. I mean, ideological and incompetent.

I mean, she was incompetent before she ran for district attorney. The mayor is incompetent. I'm not saying that like in some rhetorical way. I mean, genuinely not bright, like genuinely not able to actually do the jobs. They're chosen for it because they've learned to recite these magical phrases around restorative justice, which is just code for not prosecuting people for absolutely heinous crimes. I mean, this situation is Oakland so bad it'll sound like I'm exaggerating, but these are, this is actually what's happening is people are allowed to commit crimes. We know that criminals, when caught, they talk about being protected by

anti-PAM, Pamela Price is the name of the district and they call it on T-PAM. On T-PAM? That's how the criminals feel like they control Oakland. I mean, it sounds like an exaggeration to your viewers, so they're not gonna believe it. Just go read up on Oakland crime. It's absolutely out of control. The only good that's coming out of it is that moderates, political moderates are starting to organize and we're working to raise the money to get the signatures to remove her from

office. Because she's going to be, she's for some quirk of the system, she has a six-year term. Not just a four-year term, but they change the system to align with presidential elections. Six-year term. So she has to be recalled. It is not safe in the east bay of California. It's really not safe in San Francisco. It's not safe in Los Angeles. The police have warned not to go out with jewelry in Los Angeles. The crimes have reached places like Hollywood. So it's gotten the the problem has moved outside of the normally high crime neighborhood so

much that even middle upper middle class folks are now so affected by it that's trying to get organized. What other kinds of crimes are you seeing? I mean, from what I understand, they let just about, they let a lot of people out of prison over there. They, a lot of people got out of prison. They have huge reductions of prison population. They have defunded the police. They have demoralized the entire law enforcement community.

Yeah. Actually, that's nationwide almost, maybe not Florida, but I mean, cops all over the country are, they're demoralized. And you don't understandably so. I feel like there's a deeper agenda. I don't know what it is. I think, honestly, I think the defund the police movement was they wanted to completely gut the old mindset and demoralize them, force them out with

the force vaccines, with the, with the, with the, just demoralizing them, prosecuting them for doing their jobs, not allowing them to do their jobs. And, and, and, and you can see the recruiting videos, both in law enforcement and in the military. They've gone woke, nobody joins the military law enforcement for a woke agenda. There is a demographic that serves this country and that protects our country and goes into law enforcement. And it is not people that are interested in woke agendas.

And so it does not work, I mean, it's obvious it does not work at this point. Yet we still keep going this direction. So, I mean, do you feel like there is a deeper agenda to this? So, I mean, do you feel like there's a deeper agenda to this? I do, except for I think it's a spiritual agenda, ideological and religious agenda. Really? How so? I mean, look, what we're talking about here is the end of civilization.

Civilization depends on law and order, cheap energy, meritocracy. If you don't have this, and those are all three things that the radical woke left on lawn order, cheap energy, meritocracy. If you don't have those, and those are all three things that the radical woke left are undermining. You can even add borders, border control, but you can put that under lawn order. If you don't have lawn order, you don't have a society and a civilization.

So you see what's been attacked are all three of those things. Make energy, they're making energy expensive They're attacking law and order and they're attacking meritocracy. They're trying to make it so that it's unequal justice different laws for different races So I think it's a very I would just say if it in a word I'd call it nihilism You know I was I was working on my third book. I decided not to do it. I'm working on doing it as journalism basically, but nihilism, it results from when people stop having traditional religion, stop believing in God, they stop believing that their lives are special,

that humans are special, it's very much just a negation of civilization. That's what nihilism means, it's just the negativism just against it. On the left, there used to be a more utopian positive view. I'm not definitive, I'm just saying there used to be socialism, it used to be revolution. At best, it would get somebody like Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King. It was a very different story.

It was a story of heroic overcoming. We shall overcome was the most important song of the Civil Rights movement. You get, since then, it's darkness. The world is coming to an end from climate change. It's the police are all murderers, and they're bad. That we should stop teaching algebra to kids because there's racial disparities, undermining meritocracy. We should hire people based on their race. These are really dangerous, bad ideas

that are aimed at the destruction of civilization, coming from people who have said that they think western civilization is evil and wrong, built on genocide and slavery and all the rest of them. And we know the story. So we shouldn't be surprised that they're doing things that undermine these pillars of civilization. I'm not sure that free speech is a pillar of civilization. It's a pillar of democracy.

It's a pillar of liberal democracy and freedom. But they're also undermining that too. I've been working on the censorship issue. So I think you have to see all of it. It's a very radical nihilism. It's coming from people who are disordered. You know, people, you know, people like George Soros, he's very old now, his son controls the foundation. You know, but I, when I was involved with their activities in the 90s, even back then, there was a sense in which the criminal justice system was just completely racist.

And, you know, sure, there's racial prejudice, but we have a system of equal justice under the law. If they're not doing equal justice under the law, then you have an appeals process and there's things that we need to do to get rid of it or to reform it. But this has been an attack on the fundamentals of law and order. So absolutely, defund the police, demoralize the police, let it people out of prison that should belong in prison. It's all accelerated. It's that, you know, when I first started, we're doing research on homelessness in that

2019 to 2021. I could see it on the streets of LA. accelerated so that when I first started we're doing research on homelessness in that 2019 to 2021, I could see it on the streets of LA. I would see it suddenly there was all sorts of very, not just sick people, not just addicts, but scary people. People with a lot of face tattoos, people that clearly had been in prison gangs, controlling the drug trade. I had not really felt very scared in homeless areas like Skid Row.

I did start to feel more worried when I was there afterwards. And I think it was just influx of people from the prisons. I mean, you know, you're a police officer. It's a service job. You know, you're a public servant. You're a boy scout. I'm not saying there's not some bad cops. Obviously, there's some bad cops out there. But part of the reason you want to have a large police forces is that when you discover this, somebody's a bad cop, you can let them go without significantly

reducing size of police force. In fact, we know that police are better when there's more of them. There's, they have time for training. They have time for personal wellness. They have time for, they don't have to work overtime all the time. I mean, we are working our cops in California. All of them, like they're working overtime constantly. They're burned out. They feel persecuted because they are, in many ways, by the public, by the activists. They're always holding up cell phones on routine traffic stops.

They're telling the police that they shouldn't do traffic stops. Traffic stops are great. It's how we prevent drunk driving. It's how we pull guns off the streets. It's how we find bad guys that are out. We have warrants for their arrests. It's how we get them off the street. They've demonized just routine police activities.

One of the most exciting things we discovered while researching San Francisco was police prevent murder. I mean, it sounds obvious, but you sometimes hear people deny this. They'll say things like, oh well, police don't prevent crime. That is absolute nonsense. More police reduce crime.

And it's very well established. It's been established for decades. It's common sense, but they've proven it in many studies and they prevent murders and homicides and the best cops, they get out of their cars, they walk around the neighborhoods, they know who the young men are, the vague spec of violence from, they have a relationship with them, they look them in the eye, they say, hey, how are you doing, Jimmy? You know, how they go see their mother.

They walk, they go in the home. They have a coffee with the grandma or the mom or the aunties. They have a relationship with the kids. They see them. And they get in the heads of the young men who could end up in the community in a homicide that Friday night.

That's our unite. What you saw after Black Lives Matter and do you fund the police? Is the police would stay in their cars. They would not walk around. They were scared to walk around. They'd been demonized by the society, demoralized. And so you get a spike in homicides and murders

and other crimes. So for me, I get very emotional about it because I think that police are these guys that are vast majority of them trying to do the right thing, wanting to do the right thing, they want to prevent violence, they're not bullies. Again, there's some bad eggs, we can deal with those guys. But the mistreatment of police officers, it's an injustice that occurred, and we haven't

recovered from it. I mean, we're 540 police officers short in San Francisco, hundreds of police officers short in Oakland, hundreds of police officers short in Los Angeles. And you're right. I mean, these things are true across the United States. They just happen to be worse in California. Mm-hmm.

What is, I mean, is anybody signing up? Is there any number? I mean, it's tiny numbers in the cadets and the academy. There's just tiny numbers for it? I mean, it's tiny numbers and the cadets and the academy, there's just tiny numbers. So it's actually, it's actually, it looks like it's gonna get much, much worse before it gets better. I think we owe the police an apology.

I mean, I think so too. You know, and a proper apology, you know, like an easy apology, it's not really a true apology. You know, people that are quick to just be like, oh, I'm sorry, whatever, it doesn't mean anything. A proper, we need a proper apology for the police. You know, we need to, you know, and it starts with the mayor,

it starts with the governor of California, the mayor of San Francisco, they need to apologize. We need some sort of public ceremony, you know, we need some reconciliation and some, and we need to ask the police for their forgiveness because they were done wrong. I mean, I interview police that during the Black Lives Matter protests, they had feces thrown on them. Bags of urine thrown on them.

They didn't deserve that. These are police officers who are pretty sophisticated people. They're aware of the mental illness problems or aware of addiction. They've learned how to use restraints, physical restraints in ways that are much more compassionate. They've reduced how much they chase people, but then it's gone so far in the direction. Now they can't use the right holds on people to protect themselves. They're scared of being victims of lawsuits.

So we need to apologize to the police and clean up the broken spiritual, psychological, social relationship between the society and the police. Then we need to go and change the laws to give the police the powers they need to do their jobs and prevent crime. Homicide and murder are the top of it, but all of them. I think you're right.

I think it's going to get a lot worse. I mean, the police officers that I know in California, all of them, the only reason they're still there is there are only a few years from retirement. Yeah. So you have a, I don't wanna say elderly, but you have a veteran law enforcement community who's not doing anything because they're just gonna write it out. In five years, when these guys are all retired and nobody's signing up,

you guys aren't gonna have a law enforcement community. No. There will be nothing. Well, we need to do something. Look, these guys, you know, because we did have a very generous retirement package for police. I think it's still in place and highway patrol and others. Some of these guys can retire at like 55. But the truth of the matter is, you know, I mean, at least for me, you know, it turned, I'm 52. You only figure out what you're doing when you're like in your 50s, in your 40s and

50s. So I would want to, if I were governor, I would want to arrange something where we would ask officers to please stick around for a little bit longer. These officers in their 50s can be quite brilliant. I mean, even in their 60s, you don't have to necessarily have to be on patrol, but I would say, what can we do to keep you around on the force even if it's 20 30 hours a week? You know I love working. I think a lot of great cops love working Let's see what we can do to keep them around for a little bit longer until we can replenish our cadet academies

So you would incentivize them something you got to do something you got to keep people there I mean if we need it's not you know California, it's not a problem of money in California. I mean, we have a huge, that's the tech industry. I mean, you have Hollywood, you have farming, you have all these industries, but the tech industry, I mean, it is the biggest industry in the world. I mean, it's, and now we're having a new boom on AI. So rich people like to live in California.

So, and we pay ridiculous sums of money in taxes. It's not a problem with money. We have a public safety problem. We have a addiction and mental health emergency. We need to deal with these things. You need politicians that are going to do the right thing, tell the public what we need to do, and that's just what they want to hear.

How often are these, I see all this footage of these mobs of people raiding Nordstrom's raiding Walmart, Target, whatever, the Gucci store. I mean, how often is that happening? Is this like an everyday occurrence? Yeah, I mean, there, it's obviously some families that are very tied up with crime, shame on those parents, you know, shame on these families that are engaged in that, they need to be prosecuted, you know, it's organized,

you know, these are rings, you know, certainly there's, I'm sure addiction is there, but, you know, some of it's thrill seeking. When criminals get interviewed, it's not what Alexandria, Acacia, Cortez thinks, which is that people are doing because they can't afford to eat. Young men involved in crime, it's thrilling.

I don't see them stealing food. No. I did not see them stealing food. No, there's no consequences for those behaviors. You know, the radical left convinced people that it wasn't compassionate to have consequences for behaviors. And it extended including the addiction and the homelessness, it extended to things like theft. And now apparently no clinic extends to homicide. It extends to homicide. Yeah.

I mean, these examples I give where if somebody serves a year in jail for homicide and think it's let out, this is, I mean, that's how you destroy a civilization. What is, as far as the crime is concerned, what hope do you have that this is going to turn around? Well, yeah, and I is going to turn around? Well, yeah, and I was gonna answer that earlier question in terms of the crimes we're seeing. You do get different kinds of crimes, depending on what city and where you're at.

There's, in San Francisco, I mean, it's very famous now for getting your car broken into. I mean, the chances are high that your car will get broken into in San Francisco. Now it was that way when I was there in the 90s, but it's gotten much worse recently. We've, you know, the homicides tend to be worse in Oakland than in San Francisco, just based on the folks committing those crimes. But we are now seeing home invasions in Oakland. And I think nothing quite awakens you to the threat,

like a home invasion. It's a pretty, it's a pretty horrible events. So I think it's the rise of home invasions that finally led some of the folks in Oakland to say, we're gonna have to recall the district attorney. There's a short term and a long term thing. I mean, the short term thing is we need to raise somewhere around three to $7 million in Oakland

to get the signatures to recall the district attorney. I think that's gonna happen. I mean, there's enough affluent folks that will help to make that happen in Oakland. They need to step up. Medium long term, we have to have a pro-human vision. So, I was mentioning before the nihilism, which is really a kind of anti-humanism, we see it on all of those attacks on civilization, our anti-human attacks.

It's inhumane, the treatment of the mentally ill and the addicts on the streets, inhumane, the treatment of the police. It's inhumane what's happening on the border. This racial, this, this, this, everything is race, every, you know, this whole obsession with race, it's dehumanizing. We're human beings. We're not our race.

We're not reducible to the color of our skin. We need to get back to Martin Luther King's original, I have a dream vision move. I'm not going to say color blindness because I think it's very hard to be color blind. I don't think it's necessary, but we need to get back to a place of loving all people for who they are on the inside and not on the outside. And we need abundant energy and food. We need to have prosperity so people have a better future.

Most people may be want to have a better future. I mean, people, a lot, most people maybe want to have, they don't have big needs. They would like to have a house with a yard and a barbecue and somewhere to raise their kids safe, when it good school for their kids. I would say this is a pro-human agenda. People are so obsessed with left and right and those terms don't make a lot of sense anymore.

We've seen Republicans move in different directions. They become a little bit more opposed to military interventions, liberals a little bit more in support of military interventions. We've seen Republicans shift on things like social security and Medicare. We've seen chaos on the border. I want to get back to basics. If you're pro-human and we should affirm humankind because we're a very special species, you know, we think special in the universe for a variety of reasons. And if you're prohuman, then you have to be pro-civilization. And if you're pro-civilization, that means you want law and order, cheap energy, meritocracy, and if you want to live in a free

society, that means you need freedom of speech. Very simple things. I don't think those are left-right things. I think those are pro-human versus anti-human things. We need to affirm those things and invest in them and protect them against, I think, an inhumane woke ideology. And I don't mean to overly pick on the left. I do think that the left has been driving a lot of these terrible behaviors,

but certainly we've seen some nihilism as well on the right. And I think this is the right play. You get back to basics. You know, in a time where there's so much chaos in the system, you know, there's so much distrust. There's so much abusive power. You know, we've been working on FBI whistleblowers. These FBI whistleblowers, I mean, there's some of the best people I've ever met.

These guys, these are like Boy Scouts. These are guys that can recite passages of the Constitution to you. They carry the Constitution with them. When they're superior to the FBI, I would ask them if they're loyal to the FBI, I'd say I'm loyal to the Constitution. That's the right answer. These are the kinds of people you want in law enforcement. These are people that quit because they saw their colleagues in FBI in trapping mentally ill people,

in trapping them in order to create a phony domestic extremism. Americans are very moderate people in the heartland and whatever. We've seen the use of confidential informants. So we've started to see these institutions, whether it's Department of Homeland Security, FBI, White House, abusing powers, engaging in censorship, engaging in entrapment, going after whistleblowers. We were talking about the UFO stuff earlier, the UAP stuff. I see some of the UAP abuses of power, and that's very similar to other abuses of power. We are overdue for a period of serious reform in this country. I think it has to, it has to manifest politically somehow.

There has to be demand for it from the public. But I do think we're in a period like the 70s. You know, in the 70s, when we became aware through the church committee hearings of MK Ultra, where the CIA and FBI were involved in mind control and drugs and drugging people with other knowledge, targeted assassinations. All these abuses of how we got to clean up these institutions,

you got to remove the narcissist and the psychopaths who run them. You got to remove the narcissist and psychopaths from political office, because they only serve themselves and they're weaponizing these institutions. So for me, that's the right path forward. And you needed at every level of our society, federal, state, and local. And you needed in the culture. That's why I mean, it's why I love talking to you and love seeing this if the you're doing is to rehumanize

the people that are doing the hard work, the people that are protecting our country, you know, the people that are serving in our military, serving as police officers, working at the power plants, working at the feedlots, you know, doing the Lord's work and not getting their respect that they deserve from the society. Next on the Sean Ryan Show. Next on the Sean Ryan Show. I think another thing I've been interested in is the way that we think about free will in the context of this. So in the Christian story, free will is part of how you deal with the fact that there's evil in the world, and yet we believe in a God that is ostensibly all-powerful and all-good. How can you have a God that's not powerful and all-good and love evil in the world and yet we believe in a God that is ostensibly all powerful and all good. How can you have a God that's all powerful and all good?

It's love, evil in the world. One of the answers that's been given is that we have free will and so there's something on us to choose a better world and so we're sort of realizing God's will through our actions and behavior, but we're doing it freely. We're not just God's puppets. There's free will and that we're actually, and that you know, is belief.

What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe?

What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? What do you believe? The former Navy SEAL Mike Ritland keeps it real on the Mike Drop podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the stage Rudy Reyes.

The ethics of martial art is why I joined the Marine Corps. I never thought I was going to join the military because I'd been around so much gun violence and I wanted to be the antithesis of that. I love fighting hand-to-hand, it's fair. You don't have to kill your opponent. You can beat them with ability and skill. Bike drop, raw, unfiltered, intellectually sound. Wherever you listen.